Friday, July 05, 2013

Mideast Jewish thinkers no one remembers

This article by
Tsafi Saar in Haaretz casts a useful spotlight on little known Middle Eastern thinkers, but is infected by the misconception that a common, or overlapping Middle Eastern culture, can serve as a bridge between Jews and Arabs. There is no sound evidence for this. The trouble lies with sociologists like Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, who seek to politicise culture, viewing identity through a fashionable anti-orientalist lens, when the reality was much more fluid.My comments are interspersed in italics:

Professor Zvi Ben-Dor.

The cover of a book by Jacqueline Kahanoff, called 'Between Two Worlds.'Below: Tel Aviv's Kahanoff Street.All photos by Emil Salman

Esther
Moyal (1873-1948) was without doubt an impressive woman, whose cultural
influence spread across Beirut, Cairo, Istanbul and the Land of Israel.
She wrote journalistic essays about the issues of the day, penned books
that gave her a name across the Arab world, was a respected orator, and
the host of a literary salon held at her Jaffa home.

But
odds are that not a single reader has ever heard of her, or of any
other name on the long list of intellectuals of North African and Middle
Eastern descent, known as Mizrahim, who were active in this period
before the establishment of the State of Israel. These were
intellectuals who saw themselves as part of the Middle Eastern cultural
sphere, anchored in both Arab and Western culture, living and working in
harmony with their surroundings.

These
essays about identity, politics and culture between the years of 1893
and 1958 depict a cultural milieu that has been all but forgotten.

Among
the important people mentioned in the book is Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche,
who in his own 1931 "Parshat Haiyai" ("Reminiscences of My Life") writes
this about Zionism: "From the day of Herzl's appearance with the idea of
political Zionism, Zionist propaganda has described, in all countries
and all languages, the Land [of Israel] where we are going to build our
national home as a desert land desolate and abandoned, without
inhabitants."

Chelouche
goes on to say that after describing the land as virgin soil, developed
by Zionist methods, there is "one thing that they forgot - attention to
the inhabitants that already reside in this land."

Chelouche, known as the 'abducted child', pleaded for coexistence and for Arabs to abandon extremism during the 1920s and 30s. But his efforts were in vain, as Sarah Honig demonstrates.

Ben-Dor
Benite, a professor at New York University currently on a visit home,
says with a smile that if he and other Mizrahi intellectuals and
activists of our era thought that they were inventing something – these
writings show that they are only continuing along the paths of their
predecessors. "When we spoke about the erasure of Mizrahi culture we
didn't know what we were talking about," he says.

These
early 20th century intellectuals weren't anti-Zionists, Ben Dor Benite
says. They aspired to a Jewish state and supported the return of the
Jews to their land, but at the same time called for cooperation with
Muslim leaders and warned of the disastrous arrogance with which the
Jews from Europe behaved. And this was from the first days of Zionism,
decades before Martin Buber, Hugo Bergmann and Gershom Scholem's Brit
Shalom group that was established during the period of the British
Mandate after hostility had already erupted between the sides.

Moreover,
many decades before Edward Said wrote about Orientalism while sitting
in an American university, says Ben-Dor Benite, Hayyim Ben-Kiki, a
Moroccan rabbi who lived in Tiberias wrote about Western attempts to
subjugate the East. He wrote that because the West could not do so with
arms, it enlisted the services of the humanities and social sciences to
do so, paving paths to racism that are familiar from early sociology.

Ben-Kiki,
an ultra-Orthodox Sephardi rabbi, wrote about this subject already in
1920. In another essay, the rabbi complained about the impoverished
language of modern Arabic, which drew less and less from the Koran.

Is the West also to blame for impoverished Arabic? Ben-Dor Benite ignores another tendency current at the time - the 'Lawrence of Arabia' tendency to romanticise the Levant.

These
Jewish intellectuals, including Avraham Elmalih, Nissim Malul, David
Sitton, Sasson Dallal and others were their own school of thought, as
Ben-Dor Benite and Behar show in their book. The writings of these
thinkers emphasize that the Jews of the Middle East always viewed
themselves as Mizrahim. This view flies in the face of the widely held
assumption that Middle Eastern identity first arose in the State of
Israel in response to, and even in opposition to, Ashkenazi Jewish
identity.

Mizrahi identity exists independently, and has no need to define itself in opposition to anything.

From their perspective, the significance of the return of Jews
to their homeland was also a return to Middle Eastern identity, even
for Jews who had lived for hundreds of years in Europe.

This
worldview was ultimately defeated. Jews of Middle Eastern identity were
transformed from a social and political topic in the Middle East to a
social problem in the State of Israel, according to Ben-Dor Benite.

A contentious assertion. Some Mideastern Jews may have been a social problem in the 1950s, but only a fool would generalise.

Later on, when the East for Peace ("Hamizrach el Hashalom") movement was
formed in the eighties, or when in the nineties, with the advent of the
Oslo Accords, the Jews of Middle Eastern origin were referred to as
some sort of bridge to the Palestinians, the speakers didn't know that
this was not a new idea, but one mentioned already 100 years ago.

Esther
Moyal was among those who espoused such ideas a century ago. Two
lectures she delivered in Beirut – masterpieces of Mizrahi feminism –
appear in Behar and Ben-Dor Benite's book. In 1912, Moyal said (loosely
translated), "We women and men of the East are deifying Westernizing,
giving them the power to patronize us." This was years before the
feminists of our times spoke of the internalization of oppression.

Ben-Dor
Benite points to another text, which appears in the book, by the writer
and essayist Jacqueline Kahanoff, considered the mother of Middle
Eastern Jewish feminism in Israel. Visiting one of the transit camps for
Jewish immigrants in Israel in 1956, she interviewed a Moroccan woman,
and wrote about the crisis faced by Jewish immigrants from Middle
Eastern countries, in the Al Hamishmar newspaper. The gap, between the
powerful speech of a Mizrahi feminist in 1912 and the crisis written
about by a Mizrahi feminist during the 1950s, attests to the great,
tragic change that took place during those years.

Becoming
acquainted with these men and women and with their activities and
writings from 100 years ago provokes many questions. Why has a graduate
of the Israeli educational system never heard of these people – or the
option they represent? Why was this option struck a decisive blow? And
can it be revived?
The
book casts doubt on the commonly held view that the confrontation
between the native Palestinians in Israel and the Jews that came here
from Europe was inevitable because they came from opposite sides of a
cultural divide.

That isn't entirely true, says culture researcher Amos
Noy, whose work focuses on Middle Eastern Jewish intelligentsia in
Jerusalem toward the end of the Ottoman period.

Delving
into the stories of these Middle Eastern Jewish intellectuals raises
the possibility that there wasn't such a divide, says Noy, who is also
participating in the Van Leer discussion. Here were men and women who
were Jewish nationalists, who moved between the cultures, growing up on
Arab culture but reading Victor Hugo. This is an opening for another
possibility of life that is not based on the aggressive dichotomy that
only one side can live here.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)